Suburban Anatomy

Suburban Anatomy PENELOPE LAYLAND

PANDANUS POETRY

Suburban Anatomy

Suburban Anatomy PENELOPE LAYLAND

PANDANUS BOOKS Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Cover: Cobbler Pool, watercolour by Ian Wroth © Penelope Layland 2005 This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Typeset in Weiss 11pt on 15pt and printed by CanPrint Communications National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Layland, Penelope Suburban Anatomy. ISBN 1 74076 169 3. I. Title. A821.3 Published by Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Pandanus Books are distributed by UNIREPS, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052 Telephone 02 9664 0999 Fax 02 9664 5420 Consultant Editor: Adrian Caesar Production: Ian Templeman, Justine Molony and Emily Brissenden

For Michael

CONTENTS

On the horizon

1

Somnambulist

2

Kitchen

3

Lost child

4

Within miles of you

5

The purpose of purring

6

The strangers

7

January ritual

8

Lookout

10

Waiting room, and after

11

Scent

12

Urban archaeology

13

Town women

14

Public notices

15

The sign

16

Muttonbird Island

17

A long, long-distance goodbye

18

Inconsequentially yours

19

Resting place

20

Blackberrying

22

Amusement park

23

vii

viii

Cultivation notes for a marriage

24

Contagion

25

No going back

28

After the test

29

Time line

30

Wave watching

31

Transformer

32

Choosing music for a funeral

33

Drink to me

34

Evidence of a life

35

Lighthouse

36

Miraculous

37

Hearing Jim Jones

38

Casuarina

39

His childhood home is on the market

40

Losing it

41

High

42

Old cat

43

Carnies

44

In the natural science museum

45

Kite

46

Yamba twilight

47

No defence

48

Cave

49

On the horizon

The sea pulls me twenty ways and none of them is landward. A long way out, two irregularities are there, then not. Later I might aim a spyglass, turn them into sailing ships and make the selvedge horizon seem a furrowed field between. In truth I like them better as singularities while I swim: vast-hulled cargo vessels of eyeless iron, oil rigs with storm waves surging at their feet. We all have our notions of romance.

Suburban Anatomy

1

Somnambulist

She is walking again. Looking for something grazed by a blank stare, just out of reach. Her fingers snap in frustration. ‘What are you looking for?’ he asks, roused by the light. ‘You know!’ she cries. ‘You know!’ But he doesn’t, and will not be a party to her fright. In the morning, packing lunches, sipping tea, she will recall her journey, if prompted, will accept she has rummaged beside this bed stared muttering into that closet, patted the blankets wildly. But she is no closer to naming or putting her hand on the thing laid down so casually, then lost.

2

Suburban Anatomy

Kitchen

Growing women in my kitchen. Feeding them up on what it means. Small morsels mostly, the taste of tomato high with basil which brings the flies banging on the screen, a dab of sugar sandy on the tongue and vinegar behind the eyes. Half-lessons delivered through onion tears. I can’t do anything I say as another cake flops. You can be anything you like I tell them as I turn the chops.

Suburban Anatomy

3

Lost child

They search the stock dams first — neighbours, solid men feigning nonchalance, the self-righteous, the busy-bodies, the merely excited and somewhere, the father, whose looks keep going to the bush beyond, gathering itself. Already he knows it’s hopeless, imagines fair hair fanned on water or a scrap of checked shirt snagged in rocks. This is not a place where children are found warmed by bitch-breath curled with the cubs, folded and suckled in a skin-lined pouch or chilled to thousand-year slumber in moss and thorn. He scans his fence-line, set and strained by hand. It cannot keep out what cannot be kept out. Sometimes at dusk he swears dark shapes flit between the gums. Other times there’s a suggestion of smoke on the wind. The termites are audible in the rafters. He always sleeps badly, and alone, imagining ancient laws and unfamiliar music. ‘Over here,’ comes the cry and the men converge at some distant point where the fence line meets the trees.

4

Suburban Anatomy

Within miles of you

Gauze curtains of rain billow across the nearer hills yellow-black and drenching. Too late for the season’s lambs but still — Thunder has worried the distance for most of the afternoon. I must be driving at storm-speed for the gap between us never lessens nor will — I’ve always been a watcher of yellow-lit windows across black fields. I imagine you at your table, reading and I at your door, hand raised but still.

Suburban Anatomy

5

The purpose of purring

A cat will purr while dying, a chantry singer for its own wisp of soul. No plangent self-pity just instinctual comfort — an imagined hand a mother-tongue rasping. One response serves for ecstasy and ending.

6

Suburban Anatomy

The strangers

Seven months after the firestorm my horizon is sooty with black cockatoos, refugees from the vanished forests now mourning over my foreign hills. Thirty or more, they eddy like cinders in unseen up-draughts, calamitous drops, with the reckless beauty of the bereft, stately, even when unchoreographed. I don’t know where they go by night and never see them settle, only search. Late afternoons out of nowhere they stream unflapping in their saw-toothed, serried rows and for one instant blot my dying sun like something leathery from a cave.

Suburban Anatomy

7

January ritual

New year, new address book and the same old dilemma — which names will make the jump? The doctor, yes, the after-hours locum the in-laws and the salon: the business of living. Next, the names to which you can put a hairline and approximate weight. The ones whose houses smell familiar. The ones with whom a silence can stretch without dismay. Excised easily are the dead or the dead to you. Pause. Run your finger over that name. Recall. Regret. Excise.

8

Suburban Anatomy

Less clear-cut, less clearly cut, the neglected and neglecters, the could-be friends if life permitted. It can take time to face the truth, three years, three new books, but finally they go — just left behind. A gentler exit, and little risk this way that you’ll ever be discomfited by a stranger’s name in your own hand. This way is best, a ruthlessly redrafted resume a curriculum vitae of who you know and therefore who you want to be.

Suburban Anatomy

9

Lookout

Out early, running, I exhaust myself with hills but at the top there’s only the view, then descent. Later at my desk I can’t keep my eyes from the window. I think I was meant for a different life, one of ritual and season. I crave a proper occupation — the slice of a spade, the exhaustion of an axe. A line of fence to finish, perhaps, work that keeps things in or out where the last metres are hard uphill and at the top, there’s the view, then descent.

10

Suburban Anatomy

Waiting room, and after

There’s an illusion of luxury, a padded silence. Folios with thick, pungent pages and a fluorescing tank of impossible, geometric fish. The smoked mirror of the reception desk lends every face the one bronzed glow. But nobody comes here for their health. The consultant’s desk carries no stethoscope. He could be a banker. He has your balance on a sheet of paper and the numbers are incomprehensible.

Suburban Anatomy

11

Scent

She smells death everywhere. The house has the high tones of old dog and the florid bass of a wreath. She sniffs constantly, slyly. Believes herself unnoticed. It is worst at night when the indoor plants switch to oxygen and the room grows close with just their two bodies. She smells it on him most of all, a peculiar mix of exhalation and thinning, damp skin. Sometimes, it is as comforting as stale perfume reawakened by an unfolding elbow after a night of sleep.

12

Suburban Anatomy

Urban archaeology

When the builders tear the kitchen out by the roots they uncover the proof of other lives. Skin grafts of old lino charting the shape of kitchens past, a scab of wallpaper, stuck fast and the leavings of long-dead joiners who pushed new-sawn cabinets in upon sawdust and sandwich scraps and sealed the lot behind new veneer. On one wall the excavation of soft plaster exposes an accretion of animal hair. A nest. On another, a faded, pencilled number and a single word: Jeanette. But I have my own ideas of what makes a home. By Friday the reinterment is complete. The bog kitchen, sunken from view, is preserved again in its peat.

Suburban Anatomy

13

Town women

The town women progress directly from girlhood to middle age. They still wear their sunburn, the first of the season, like a purple birthmark across their shoulders, but midriff tops and leggings are abandoned overnight one summer for their mother’s frocks. They marvel at the coolness, the ease of movement. That same summer the strip of hair where peroxide meets new growth sprouts silver strands as though some internal wiring has come adrift. At morning tea they allow themselves a second piece of cake.

14

Suburban Anatomy

Public notices

In a town this small each passing is oppressive each funeral notice carries the weight of familiarity and acquaintance. Old man Morris, at last. A Taylor cousin from Towns End. The bride the Thompsett boy brought back from the city thirty years ago. Even those you never knew have the jaw line of someone you do.

Suburban Anatomy

15

The sign

The first woodsmoke awakens winter. This is the trigger the season has waited for the faint tang slow-burned in the belly of a house down the street. It is an old street. The old feel the cold early. The culprit is elusive in the abrupt dusk and anyway the damage cannot be undone. By dawn there’s a hard frost, the late stars are hectic and the newsprint proclaiming the first cold snap rolls from unflinching presses.

16

Suburban Anatomy

Muttonbird Island

The sea wind is a hand palm which keeps things from the edge and brings the adult birds hurtling home at dusk. In the dark soil chicks incubate camouflaged by a silence they instinctively keep. On the day they are so fat they’re wedged in their burrows dusk brings nothing. It takes a week for the chicks to know the abandonment is real, for the burrow to grow rank with droppings, rubbed feathers and the sour smell of hunger. Then they scuttle, their compasses swinging north to the cliff face, reckless against the stop-sign wind they tip over the edge like suicide and suddenly know how to fly.

Suburban Anatomy

17

A long, long-distance goodbye

After he goes his cupboards are found full of new sheets, singlets, socks still bitten together with plastic tags, shirts in rustling stuff from a dozen Christmases. I fix him on the back step in mosquito hour in clogs of black soil knocking off clods as insects seethe at the porch light. Age-rings of sweat bleed across his chest. Later, he will grow birdlike with age, taloned with infirmity. His desiccated boots will become sanctuary for spiders. But he takes two decades to die and for each fleeting kiss, each anxious goodbye another shirt, kept for later, a pair of socks for best and winding sheets enough for a dozen funerals.

18

Suburban Anatomy

Inconsequentially yours

Back from a fortnight absence I encounter an alternate universe. The hill is gold and undulant with ripe summer grass, my accustomed path thigh-deep in it. Down the street an ancient oak is now a stump, fresh-bleeding and pungent as an abattoir. At work, a stranger sits across the way. Already, shared allusions and coded references have altered the office vocabulary. I speak an older dialect, it seems. One block away the wreckers are busy turning a petrol station into red, pegged dirt. Two weeks, but it tastes like forever.

Suburban Anatomy

19

Resting place

I always supposed my folk would lie finally in the ridge of high land above the river where the town’s fathers settled on a view for the dead. There, where denominations demarcated heavenly plots as severely as they distinguished themselves by liturgy, those who prayed together lay together: Roman Catholic. Methodist. C of E. There was no contagion here of agnosticism nor of the new faiths spread by teenage pastors in brackish river baptisms and tongues spoken in hired school halls that smell not of incense but of satchels and tennis balls. One could not have foreseen, when these pitted stones and sunken slabs were first planted and tended that things would shift so, and erode with time. These days it is only the elderly, and just a handful even then who gather to swap pleasantries and compare cancer scares on the steps after Sunday service.

20

Suburban Anatomy

The cemetery was long filled and closed by the time I needed its consolation. I visit my people now, out of town, amid cane fields and kit homes on a monstrous stretch of parched lawn where small brass tablets are set in hot brick surrounds. No angels spike the sky here, no cruciform granite is crafted to outlast petty grief, no cherubs reach a hand to comfort or dismay. There is no telling the saved from the suicide, the mayor from the meek, the still mourned from the safely put away. Each marker is fitted with a short brass tube for a drop of water and a bud. Plastic is the species of choice in this fierce heat. The dead are laid head to head beneath parched turf and visitors must tread on their faces to read the names raised without poetry or the free rhythm of plainsong in a choice of two sizes, three fonts.

Suburban Anatomy

21

Blackberrying

Beside the plush mango the pawpaw with a million roe nestling darkly in her flesh, these berries are meagre fruit, hard won. Plucked poison-black and hot from the bush they tend toward collapse and cobweb, lurk glossiest where the birds decline to reach. But for each grasping thorn, each rip there’s good weariness and a bud of warm juice compensation in the slightest of sips.

22

Suburban Anatomy

Amusement park

This ride reminds you are mortal and mostly water. Organs bunch and flop, air pushes into sinuses previously unrecorded even by infection. A pre-mortem examination of where things are tethered and how loosely.

Suburban Anatomy

23

Cultivation notes for a marriage

You don’t notice the pain till later, drawing a bath your arms come alive with the thousand insults of thorn, of rank razor weed, the cactus ambush of zucchini stems. It feels good, close to labour. In truth though, there’s little of your hand in this landscape whatever the wounds you wear. In spring the bulbs will erupt randomly all strap and stunted bloom and in autumn the annuals will be ugly and leggy by their last, hectic display. Look away, be distracted, grow bored for just a beat and grass will colonise concrete, roots prise foundations, ivy infiltrate underfloor spaces, insinuate pale through mortar.

24

Suburban Anatomy

Contagion

There is just one yawn and it passes, mouth to mouth in a ceaseless, restless yearning for sleep. Tonight it infects you in Paris, at midnight, sleet spitting on the hot lights that throw the Opera bright white up against the dark yellow sky. Lip to frozen lip from your exhalation to the indrawn breath hours later of the juror made brittle and bored by the nineteenth Polaroid of the gunshot wound. Thence to the judge’s associate, the judge (but not the accused), guard to guard and in a blossoming across the channel to a cat on a sunlit ledge, to the boy with a stick prodding something defenceless in a hedge. By next day there’s a shop girl in Delhi sighing so slightly it could be love. Suburban Anatomy

25

And there’s less shame in love than boredom so she passes it, sigh to sigh to the customer whose breath barely stirs the drapes of the sari she will buy for the flight to her unseen groom. It is a long flight in a cabin so close, knee to back, hip to hip, it becomes one long reticulated yawn. She is distressed by the in-flight movie incomprehensible as violent porn but without the porn only the violence and, unaccountably, an air disaster.

26

Suburban Anatomy

So she sleeps and the yawn seeps like yellow gas to lie at nose level, an inversion layer for this artificial, imposed dawn, waiting for the first, deep waking breath of a businessman, mid-fifties who instead of catching the taxi home heads for the airport bar where I dispense the scotch, dawn or not, look him in the face watch his fingers, his wrist imagine the feel of his kiss but settle for a sigh and turning to stack fresh glasses feel it rip my jaw open wide.

Suburban Anatomy

27

No going back

The cat has second kittenhood tugs divots from the couch. The spring wind maddens her into a crab dance. She sails unmarked through a cloud of bees arrives home late patched black with gutter life alive with fleas. When the peewees come at her she flattens to the porch. Saliva webs her whiskers. But tonight when I tempt her with a bauble of wool she looks away sour-eyed nostrils scabbed over with cancer. Her claws, unsheathed in an instant of warning are yellow and ridged as old men’s teeth.

28

Suburban Anatomy

After the test

In all the slow unfurling months she’s burying her son. He’ll live, but not the one she dreamed for. She tells no-one, hates the smiles of strangers solicitous on the street their misunderstanding so complete. When an hour passes without a kick hope is so huge it almost chokes her. He comes anyway hair coarse with cowlicks tiny ears bloodless as yellow wax. They prod him into life, chafe him warm read his eyes and palms for proof. There’s a sink, a window with a view of sky. The bedside flowers are the colour of his navy eyes which watch her and are alive.

Suburban Anatomy

29

Time line

Later, a cicada disturbs them at their rest hammers through the open door its alarm, up close, more shrill even than their fright. They trick it into a jar where it sets the glass singing. Six years underground for six days of exuberant sound. Taking it to the door she catches her reflection in the jar in her hand the new wattling of her cheek, magnified, the crepeing of her sunburned chest. She is there for an instant (the jar tips) a long time gone.

30

Suburban Anatomy

Wave watching

The sea’s seduction is a sly one time consuming as a baby’s blank face absorbing as the fractional stir of a eucalypt crown or the small annihilation of a camp fire. Such things would fill the hours of life, if we let them, keep us from making monuments to our restlessness.

Suburban Anatomy

31

Transformer

She is a beach pebble turning colours in water. This past year her legs are leaner tending tail-like her hair is sleek black and blonde from the bath her skin marbled with birthmarks and veins lustrous as quartz, smooth as pelt. I can no more take my eyes off her than if she clung to a rock combing, singing lulling me to my drowning.

32

Suburban Anatomy

Choosing music for a funeral

Leafless trees, stark as an acupuncturist’s chart with its thousand paths for transmitting pain. Chopin ripples through the unlit room till the walls ache with hammered strings. The sky is a brutal winter wash of grey. Half an hour of light. Not long.

Suburban Anatomy

33

Drink to me

Emerging from a nightmare you call for water and when it comes some ancient instinct triggers a vestigial suck. It buds your lips, convulses your throat as you reach your hands and then longer, till your teeth hit glass. Between this flash of who you once were and unstoppable fears of how you might deal with life’s later alarms, is the you of this single night, disarming, unarmed.

34

Suburban Anatomy

Evidence of a life

They meet in the reading room most weekdays. Greet like colleagues but sit as strangers absorbed by boxed papers which have the whiff of pinned butterflies. Their subjects never converge. One sifts for mention of a certain bureaucrat, the other for traces of the machinations of trade unions between the wars. Their chairs scrape in concert. Cotton-gloved they tease apart newspaper clippings whose darkening paper and fading ink meet in yellow indeterminacy. They are not in competition. When one is published, finally, by an academic press, the other is named as inspiration in the author’s meticulous foreword.

Suburban Anatomy

35

Lighthouse

You are my lighthouse — intermittent consolation, bright to cold, sheer black to phosphorescence. By day I am becalmed and you’re blank and smooth as a propped thigh, all white-washed glare against a matte and opaque sky. At night though the moon casts a gentler, revealing light and you throw your beam away into it — affection broadcast, morsels flung favour given and withdrawn, humour glinting and gone. Love, Absence. Love. Absence. Love.

36

Suburban Anatomy

Miraculous

Today it rained from a cloudless sky. The wind brought it, fine and freezing from somewhere beyond those winter hills. Once it might have been a portent. Now, you and I dismiss such things. There are explanations for the eruption of mountains the failure of crops the murder of kings. Why should we be astonished at rain from a blank blue sky? It has nothing at all to convey about the choices we make, the prayers we say. Yet there is something in it that speaks, isn’t there? Blue sky, winter dry And the rain coming anyway?

Suburban Anatomy

37

Hearing Jim Jones

I haven’t the pioneering spirit needed to take jungle, persuade it to production and collective joy. My kind are not believers, joiners, needers. Yet here, in the close dark of a lecture theatre years after the headlines and the horror your voice brays from a cheap cassette, a cautionary lesson in mass communication. This is your final, finest exhortation, shrill with love and warning. Your rhythms lull and persuade. I can smell the loam, your sweat and something sweet. Father, lover, your tongue is godlike, your panic seductive. The tape ends with a faint hiss which could be the sound of a soft, Guyanan night or a last exhalation. My dry lips crave imagined poison.

38

Suburban Anatomy

Casuarina

Each tree has its own song and none so sweet as your slow seethe a sigh of distant traffic your gentle settling to silence. Your wood’s no good or we could turn bowls thin as lead crystal and trace wet fingers on your rim to set off a trapped singing.

Suburban Anatomy

39

His childhood home is on the market

This is the high, iron rail upon which the cat walked — paused — pirouetted. He was sure she would die and so she did, though not from a fall. This is his room, small, whiter, where he lay naming shadows for their material selves (hockey sticks, hats) and hatching escapes from the intruder whose tread was audible down the hall. He sleeps better these days, leg hooked over somebody’s thigh, back to the wall. This is the table where, grown ungainly, he passed the salt, the savour of cruel names and sickened with the fear of dissolution. And yes, it ended messily, though not by divorce or delinquency. Just time, the creak and ache that afflicts everything till he’s forgotten the exact texture of the cat’s sun-warm pelt under his palm.

40

Suburban Anatomy

Losing it

Decades of infusion from the tangled banks have turned the water weak-tea gold. Further up the estuary it darkens and the light glances harshly, disguising depths, but here the sun penetrates to the sand; no concealment is possible. A breeze fans the ripples away from her in all directions as she sits, steeped lip-deep, unable to stir, a stone dropped at the centre of radiance. Her child treads water with unmarked limbs, worms of dark hair are slapped to his cheek. He is laughing at nothing. Unexpected jealousy hits her like a cramp. The breeze freshens, the ripples speed until the lake, the child, the golden day rush away from her at the speed of life.

Suburban Anatomy

41

High

Back below the treeline the hills are cauliflower-surfaced with tight-packed crowns, blanched with mist. Here, things are clear-felled by the cold, the transition as abrupt as an axe-stroke. There’s life, but it’s buttoned-up, gripping by root tip and shaped to the ground. Behind a boulder flower heads scatter like a scarlet rash. The last slope is the shortest and the steepest. Cloud spills over the crest suddenly, like an avalanche.

42

Suburban Anatomy

Old cat

Now she’s as soft again as a kitten limp with sleep. The vet says that’s that then and touches a finger to her clear, open eye. I take her home, mattock her a bed. She is still warm, curls into it. I pull the soil over her, trapping a square of sunlight so she won’t have to follow it across the yard as the afternoon cools.

Suburban Anatomy

43

Carnies

In stories, the midget weds the bearded woman and their trailer is a charming riot of step ladders and curling irons. Their children grow up to be ferris-wheel attendants, arms slung casually over the metal crush. While stars are born above, the hurdy gurdy creaks and honeymooners wheel away in space. In stories, you’d run away for this.

44

Suburban Anatomy

In the natural science museum

I am drawn again to the babies in bottles waxy as snuffed candles pudgy with long soaking. Cephalo Toracopagus Two torsos embraced faces pressed closer than an intimate kiss. Sympus, fish-tailed from the waist dismayed hands thrown up to shield his still-glued eyes. They are baby-sized grew to schedule regardless of their fatal flaws unable to sense how unsuited they would be. It was rough air and coarse touch that defeated them finally, denied them names. Their memories were elemental ones: the music of heartbeat, the lap of warm love for all their lives till the instant it took to gasp that first breath.

Suburban Anatomy

45

Kite

Why fly a kite at all? Here is a poor illusion of flight, the very meanest of freedoms. The thing that keeps a kite aloft is a state of perpetual thrall. Unleashed, it won’t fly, but fall.

46

Suburban Anatomy

Yamba twilight

The fishing fleet trickles from the breakwater, arc lights igniting in the soft, pink air. Soon it is strung along the horizon, crystal beads dipping on the twilight’s breathing neck. Later, testing the limits of vision it’s a single-streeted city of distant, white light, beckoning travellers to hazard that last extra mile of highway, that dark, heaving plain.

Suburban Anatomy

47

No defence

Sensei says ‘Don’t think. Trust your muscle memory’. Then he strikes and I parry, too slowly — these memories are still mobile, still carving their rut. Others are deeper cut. A loop of wool plucked from a child’s clumsy fingers becomes catscradleharbourbridgeparachute — channels impressed in playground tarmac three decades gone, still sluicing. Trust the past, the rote, the automatic. Trust the instrument to make the music, the racquet to connect, for footfall to follow footfall, breath breath. Ah, but live too with the conjuring, unannounced, of your missing embrace, the learnt angle of my arm, the ritual reach of my kiss. Years on, your memory is in my muscle, in my heart-knock, in my sinew — in my brain stem, where I am at my most primitive.

48

Suburban Anatomy

Cave

We call this formation the Leaning Tower. See? Leaning? The good news is it’s more stable than its namesake — the whole cave system is. There hasn’t been a rock fall here since the big wet of ‘49. There’s a memorial to the tour party just outside the gift shop. You might have seen it. Single file on the steps please, it’s slippery. Not normally so, but lately, after all this rain. To your left, the Indian Chief. In profile, see? The feathers? The nose? And his squaw — there? No, there. There! Up there! Forget it. Watch your heads please and as you come through don’t miss the flowstone and the little pool. I call it the Fairy Grotto. Dry for years, until this week so you’re in for a real treat. See it glisten? I’ve tried and tried for coloured lights, but who listens? We are sixty metres beneath the surface ladies and gentlemen … no-one to hear you scream (just my little joke) and the darkness, if I hit this switch, is absolute. See? Now, through the next chamber, up and to the right the organ pipes, the wedding cake, the altar and the posy.

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49

Always gives me goosebumps. And there, with the hair, Christ, crucified. Well use your imaginations. Keep up at the back please and watch your step the rungs may be slippery. Are slippery. Let me help you ma’am. Can you put your weight on it? I did say to be careful. Single file on this section please there’s a drop to the left — the guard rail’s out. All this rain. That’s it. Carefully now. This next chamber is something special. I won’t say too much. Just think ‘Massacre of the Innocents’. Damn. Keep calm please, I have a torch … had a torch. Yes, sir, I can hear the water too. Yes, sir, it’s getting louder. Sir, I would ask you please not to alarm the children.

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Suburban Anatomy

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